After The Holidays, Look For New Books From Keneally, Drury

December 06, 1992|By JOCELYN McCLURG; Courant Book Editor

It's the height of the Christmas book season, but we won't let that prevent us from looking ahead to the new fiction that will be winging our way this winter through early spring. Look for new novels from John Grisham, Anita Brookner, Robin Cook, Thomas Keneally, Kathryn Harrison and many others. (Books are often in stores before their official publication date, so some January books may show up on the shelves this month.) A woman who has devoted her life to doing good mysteriously disappears in "Fraud" (Random House), British writer Anita Brookner's newest novel about unhappy women.

In the courtroom thriller tradition of Scott Turow and Grisham comes Richard North Patterson's "Degree of Guilt" (Knopf). With a 250,000-copy first printing, Knopf is expecting this novel about a powerful TV journalist accused of murdering a famous novelist to be a blockbuster.

T.M. McNally, who won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for his collection of stories "Low Flying Aircraft," is publishing his first novel, "Until Your Heart Stops" (Villard). It tells the story of a teenage suicide and its repercussions on the lives of four people.

In "Three Lives" (Houghton Mifflin), Louis Auchincloss once again turns his patrician eye to moneyed society.

"Dunster" (Viking), John Mortimer's new novel, was a No. 1 best seller in England. The author of the "Rumpole" tales has written a barbed account of an accountant whose job is jeopardized by his chief nemesis, a journalist who has already sabotaged the accountant's marriage and acting career.

The sudden death of Clover Adams, Henry Adams' wife, has fascinated scholars and students of "The Education of Henry Adams" for more than a century. The story of the Adams' marriage is fictionalized in Sarah Booth Conroy's "Refinements of Love" (Pantheon).

In January, Doubleday will publish "The Furies," the last novel

Janet Hobhouse wrote before she died in 1991. Semi-autobiographical, it delves into a family of quarrelsome women.

The fine young British writer Jeanette Winterson ("Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," "Sexing the Cherry") has written a novelistic meditation on desire called "Written on the Body" (Knopf).

Best known for her war reporting, Martha Gellhorn (Ernest Hemingway's third wife) also has written fiction reflecting her experiences as a witness to some of the greatest dramas of the 20th century. A selection of her short works is collected in "The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn" (Knopf).

Historian Antonia Fraser also has written a series of popular mysteries featuring Jemima Shore. Jemima is back in a new Fraser collection, "Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave and Other Stories" (Bantam).

"The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court" (Knopf) collects a novella, 10 stories and three one-act plays by Peter Taylor.

Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn is the author of "Now You Know" (Viking), a comic novel about the collision of sex and politics in Britain.

Ann Hood, whose novels include "Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine," has written a compassionate family drama, "Places To Stay the Night" (Doubleday).

Doubleday continues its program of publishing the work of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. "Adrift on the Nile," Mahfouz's 1966 novel about a group of disaffected Egyptians, is due out in February.

John Grisham is like a legal eagle who can't lose a case. Will "The Client" (Doubleday) be another winner? A New Orleans defense attorney kills himself on the eve of the biggest trial of his career; when the trial begins, the life of a young boy who witnessed the bizarre suicide is threatened.

Kathryn Harrison's acclaimed debut novel, "Thicker Than Water," was a harrowing tale of incest and self-destructiveness. She returns with "Exposure" (Random House), about a successful photographer who takes speed and shoplifts because she is haunted by her childhood, when she was the model for a celebrated but controversial series of photographs taken by her father.

William Morrow is reissuing for a new generation of readers Rumer Godden's "China Court," the story of a country house in Wales and the five generations of the family who inhabited it.

New Haven writer Alice Mattison ("Field of Stars") is the author of a new collection of short stories called "The Flight of Andy Burns" (William Morrow). Her previous collection of stories was "Great Wits." In a departure from her usual brand of mystery, P.D. James looks into a frightening near future in "The Children of Men" (Knopf). It is the year 2021 and the human race is coming to an end because males have mysteriously become infertile.

Rebecca Goldstein, author of "The Mind-Body Problem" and "The Dark Sister," has written a collection of short stories called "Strange Attractions" (Viking).

Set in the Australian outback, Thomas Keneally's "Woman of the Inner Sea" (Doubleday) follows a woman who has endured a horrifying loss and sets out on a walkabout to find both vengeance and salvation.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a novelist known for her screenplays for the Merchant-Ivory team, explores the lifelong bond between two cousins in "Poet and Dancer" (Doubleday).

A brother, sister and childhood neighbor are reunited as adults in Sue Miller's "For Love" (HarperCollins).

Allen Drury ("Advise and Consent") continues the adventures of the university crowd depicted in "Toward What Bright Glory?" in his new postwar novel, "Into What Far Harbor?" (William Morrow).

Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel and the screenplay for "The Player," returns with another very black comedy about life in L.A. in "Among the Dead" (Morrow).

"American Star" (Simon & Schuster) is a love story that follows the rapid rise of a cult superstar from his days of boyhood poverty, by Beverly Hills' own Jackie Collins.